United States of America

United States of America. The high water marks of the impact of Irish immigrants on the United States were in the 40 years before the American Civil War. Between 1820 and 1860 emigrants from Ireland never formed less than 35 per cent of all new immigrants, and sometimes as much as 45 per cent. By the 1880s this figure was down to 12.5 per cent, and by the turn of the century it stood at less than 4 per cent. In 1960 Irish immigrants formed less than 1 per cent of the total. These realities are central to an understanding of how the Irish American group in the USA was formed and continues to be formed. What was once the largest obvious immigrant community in America, including within it a large minority born in Ireland, has become one mature, complex, multigenerational group among many.

Estimates of the overall numbers who left Ireland to settle in the USA are difficult to formulate. The problems include the frequently ineffectual counting system at ports both of entry and departure, the ease with which, for much of its history, the US–Canadian border could be crossed and recrossed, and the fact that Irish immigrants did not necessarily arrive in America direct from their homeland. In the last case, for instance, a large minority of Irish settlers in California came via Australia. Overall it seems that in excess of 5.5 million, but not more than 6 million, people have left Ireland for the United States since the foundation of the American Republic in 1776. Because the predominant mass of immigrants arrived before 1900, and because there were perhaps as many as 400,000 people in the USA with an Irish background at the time of the first census in 1790, the current size of the Irish multigenerational group is very large. Estimates of its late 20th‐century size vary strikingly, but by some reckonings it was in excess of 40 million people. No one, whatever their method of calculation, would put it below 21 million.

Whatever the absolute numbers, there is an unusual degree of agreement that over 50 per cent of Americans of Irish descent are Protestant. To understand this superficially surprising finding, it is worth emphasizing that a study conducted in the 1970s discovered that while 41 per cent of Catholic Irish‐Americans surveyed were at least fourth generation, no less than 83 per cent of Irish‐American Protestants were fourth generation or more. A powerful ‘accelerator factor’ is at work. Further, although it is almost certain that since the 1830s the majority of Irish immigrants have been Catholic, significant Protestant immigration continued down to the First World War. To balance, if also to complicate, this last point, there was a substantial minority of Catholics among Irish immigrants before 1830. These found themselves in an atmosphere hostile to their religion and with a skeletal church organization to receive them—quite apart from the fact that many arrived as indentured servants and were widely dispersed. Since the middle of the 19th century, an increasingly confident and well‐funded Catholic church, under a mainly Irish and Irish‐American leadership, has transformed this situation. But in earlier periods some Catholic emigrants conformed to the dominant Protestant culture.

Such discussion begs the question of what we mean by the term ‘Irish‐American’. Since the Great Famine this has become synonymous, both inside and outside America, with Catholicism and with a commitment, whether weak or strong, to the Irish national cause variously defined over the years (see irish‐american nationalism). The great weight of relevant scholarship has been founded on this assumption. If the focus remains exclusively on those from such a background, then the narrative is one of mounting success, and success defined in characteristically American terms. It is increasingly clear that among immigrants from Europe only Jewish‐Americans rank higher on such scales as time spent in formal education and levels of home income than do Catholic Irish‐Americans. By such criteria, those Protestants with an Irish heritage form a less successful group.

Taking the group as a non‐sectarian whole, its political history, like its social and economic one, again fits a properly American pattern of success. At the obvious pinnacle of the White House, the list of presidents with an exclusively or predominantly Irish origin stretches from Andrew Jackson (1828–36) to John F. Kennedy (1960–3). Many who failed to gain the presidency made a powerful contribution to Washington politics, and they range from such figures as James G. Blaine in the late 19th‐century Republican Party to speaker of the House Thomas P. O'Neill in the Democratic Party 100 years later. Because much that is important in the US federal system goes on in local politics, it is equally necessary to emphasize the role of Irish‐Americans at this level, particularly in large urban centres. This is most obvious in the history of New York, Boston, and Chicago politics, but the list could be much extended. Any list of potent Irish‐American political figures in this context would include John F. FitzGerald (1863–1950) in Boston, Richard J. Daly (1902–77) in Chicago, and Charles F. Murphy (1858–1924) in New York. Murphy was an unusually effective organizer in a long line of Irish‐Americans involved with and usually dominating the political ‘machine’ associated with Tammany Hall, an organization which came to typify such politics in the USA. Such city power bases could be effectively linked to national politics, whether the example is Richard Daly's role in gaining John F. Kennedy the Democratic nomination, and the presidency itself, in 1960, or the way in which Alfred C. Smith emerged from Charles F. Murphy's organization first into New York state politics and then, as the Democratic candidate in 1928, to be the first Catholic to run for president.

That his religion was an important factor in Smith's defeat, and that Kennedy both suffered and gained in electoral terms because of his faith and origins, is a reminder of another kind of impact of Irish Catholic immigrants on the USA. This might be described as a negative impact. Anti‐Catholic and anti‐Irish feelings were frequently a force in American politics. The ‘Know Nothing’ movement of the 1850s, and the American Protective Association which reached its membership peak in 1895, are two examples of hostile, organized reaction to the Irish Catholic presence. The revived Ku‐Klux‐Klan, which reached its greatest potency in the 1920s, included anti‐Catholicism in its litany of prejudices, and worked hard to block Smith's earlier attempt to secure the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924. By then Irish‐Americans who were Catholic were linked to the battle to end prohibition, and so were ‘Wets’. Those who were Protestant were more likely to be ‘Drys’, determined to make the great Protestant prohibitionist crusade a successful one.

Clearly by this time, and indeed long before it, Irish‐Americans broadly defined were showing a tendency to be divided on many issues along what, in Ireland itself, would be seen as predictably antagonistic lines. The first Irish‐American president, Andrew Jackson (both of whose parents were Presbyterians from Co. Antrim), was able to appeal to an undifferentiated Irish vote, confident that his own deep‐seated hostility to the British crown would be attractive to the whole group. Very quickly divisions began to emerge, and by mid‐century the two communities were largely, if never entirely, going their separate ways. Catholic Irish‐Americans were a vital element in Democratic Party support, while since its foundation in the decade before the Civil War Protestant Irish‐Americans tended to support the Republican Party. There were, and are, of course, significant individual exceptions to this important general rule. Examples include Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who was president 1912–20, and Adlai E. Stevenson I, Democratic vice‐president 1892–6. But the political division could take extreme forms. The list of frequently sanguinary ‘Orange and Green’ riots in New York city stretches from the 1820s to the 1870s. There is evidence that those who led the Scots Irish movement of the late 19th century tried to enlist support for opposition to home rule. But such activity was trivial compared to the efforts of some Catholic Irish‐Americans to activate their community in the cause of Irish nationalism.

Bibliography

Akenson, D. H. , The Irish Diaspora (1993)
Doyle, D. N. , ‘The Irish in North America’, in W. E. Vaughan (ed.), New History of Ireland, v: Ireland under the Union 1801–70 (1989)
Miller, K. H. , Emigrants and Exiles (1985)

S. J. S. Ickringill